“Information might be a substance. Can you imagine
that?”
~M. John Harrison, Light
Can you imagine that?
M.
John Harrison’s Light is yet another
example of recent science fiction literature that subverts the expectations of
the genre. It centers around three
characters who never actually meet in the course of the narrative: the first is
Michael Kearney, who, with his colleague Brian Tate, is a researcher in the
field of theoretical physics whose recent work is beginning to expose some
strange anomalies (oh yes, and Kearney is also a serial killer in his spare
time).
The
second is Ed Chianese, better known in the novel as Chinese Ed. Ed used to be an “entradista”; a space
explorer who ran risky payloads and such through indeterminate regions of
space. However, the novel takes place
after Ed’s heyday, depicting him living the remainder of his life in a state of
stasis where he indulges in dream-like fantasies; of course, this idyllic world
of sloth and sluggishness is about to come to a violent end.
Finally,
we have Seria Mau Genlicher, a K-ship pilot who has been cybernetically altered
so as to be (literally) a part of her vessel.
Kearney’s
plot takes place in 1999; Ed’s and Seria’s both take place in 2400. Across this broad temporal scope, Harrison
gives us a glimpse into an ingeniously envisioned and immaculately constructed
world. This strange setting (for even
Kearney’s 1999 plotline is ripe with oddities, particularly the serial murderer’s
haunting visions of the mysterious Shrander) revolves around an even stranger
center – central absence would be
more appropriate. Just before the
novel’s halfway point, Harrison describes the anomaly of the Kefahuchi Tract, the
enigmatic singularity at the story’s core:
This object was massively energetic. It was surrounded by gas clouds heated to
50,000 degrees Kelvin. It was pumping
out jets and spumes of stuff both baryonic and non-baryonic. Its gravitational effects could be detected,
if faintly, at the Core. It was, as one
commentator put it: “a place that had already been old by the time the first
great quasars began to burn across the across the early universe in the unimaginable
dark.” Whatever it was, it had turned
the Tract around it into a region of black holes, huge natural accelerators and
junk matter – a broth of space, time, and heaving event horizons; an
unpredictable ocean of radiant energy, of deep light. Anything could happen there, where natural
law, if there had ever been such a thing, was held in suspension. (Harrison
183)
Rather than attempt an exhaustive
analysis of the entire novel, or performing a hodge-podge of different plot
points and characters, I would really like to focus on who I believe is the
most interesting character and his place in the novel: Michael Kearney. However, this is not to say the other
characters are not interesting. If any
of my readers choose to pick up Light
at some point, simply make sure you read the passage concerning Seria Mau’s
“binding” to her K-ship; if this description does not strike something
ineffable in your core, then I doubt you have truly understood what you read:
They strap you down and give you a rubber gag to
bite on. The way is cleared for the
shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level,
which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces. They flush the rubbish out continually
through the colon. They pump you with a
white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins
and monitor your internal indicators.
They core you at four points down the spine […] (Harrison 337).
And that’s not all; believe me, it gets worse. It is one of the most relentlessly inhuman
processes I’ve ever seen imagined in fiction, and this is why I find the work
so riveting. As far as Kearney goes, I’m
mostly interested in him because of his diegetic position at the opposite end
of most of the narrative action. Kearney’s plot takes place in 1999, more than
ten years in our past even, and
incorporates elements that might better befit a horror story than a science
fiction novel.
Kearney
is haunted by visions of a mysterious being he calls the Shrander. He describes it, at one point, to his ex-wife
Anna Kearney: “‘Try and imagine,’ he had once said to Anna, ‘something like a
horse’s skull. Not a horse’s head,’ he had cautioned her, ‘but its
skull […] Imagine,’ he had told her, ‘a wicked, intelligent,
purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak. A few ribbons or strips of flesh dangle and
flutter from it. Even the shadow of that
is more than you can bear to see’” (113).
Without ruining the surprise, we can say that the Shrander constitutes a
horrific enigma for Kearney. While it
certainly materializes in a more crystallized form later in the novel, for most
of the narrative the Shrander is a speechless, ominous presence that somehow drives
Kearney’s mad desire to kill.
Kearney
has also come into the possession of a pair of dice, purportedly from the
Shrander itself. I want to share the description
of these dice as well:
Despite their colour they were neither ivory nor
bone. But each face had an even
craquelure of faint fine lines, and in the past this had led Kearney to think
they might be made of porcelain. They
might have been porcelain. They might
have been ancient. In the end they
seemed neither. Their weight, their
solidity in the hand, had reminded him from time to time of poker dice, and of
the counters used in the Chinese game of mah-jong. Each face featured a deeply incised symbol. These symbols were coloured. (Some of the colours, particularly the blues
and reds, always seemed too bright given the ambient illumination. Others seemed too dim.) They were unreadable. He thought they came from a pictographic
alphabet. He thought they were the
symbols of a numerical system. He
thought that from time to time they had changed
between one cast and another, as if the results of a throw affected the system
itself. In the end, he did not know what
to think. (163-4)
I might also mention that this is possibly one of
the few examples of fine literature that manages to incorporate the word
“craquelure”. And a bit further down:
Over the years Kearney had seen pi in the
symbols. He had seen Planck’s
constants. He had seen a model of the
Fibonacci sequence. He had seen what he
thought was a code for the arrangement of hydrogen bonds in the primitive
protein molecules of the autocatalytic set. / Every time he picked them up, he
knew as little as he had the first time.
Every day he started new. (164)
Rules and systems for categorization break down. The dice are perhaps the most obvious example
of an object in the narrative that
refutes any attempt to define them.
Analogous to these strange, porcelain-like objects is the enigmatic
Kefahuchi Tract; yet this warped fabric of space-time is also, in some ways,
inverted. The Kefahuchi Tract is not a
place where the laws of physics stop working, but a place where law becomes illimitable, and hence ceases to be
“law” at all:
Every race they met on their way through the Core
had a star drive based on a different theory.
All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic
assumptions. You could travel between
the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything. If your theory gave you a foamy space to work
with – if you had to catch a wave – that didn’t preclude some other engine,
running on a perfectly smooth Einsteinian surface, from surfing the same
tranche of empty space. It was even
possible to build drives on the basis of superstring-style theories, which,
despite their promise four hundred years ago, had never really worked at all.
(182)
We are given a glimpse of this in Kearney’s
narrative, within the laboratory that he and colleague Brian Tate. In one scene, when Kearney visits Tate, he
finds that his partner has barricaded himself in the lab, apparently afraid not
that something will get in, but that something might get out. When asked about their research, Tate
replies: “‘We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before
interference set in. That’s like a
million years down there. That’s like
the indeterminacy principle is just suspended”
(280). The indeterminacy principle, of
course, is Werner Heisenberg’s famous maxim which proposes that there is an
epistemological limit on our ability to know certain pairs of physical
properties of a particle at the same moment: when one property is measured,
another inevitably changes, and it is impossible to know the exact measurement
of both properties at once.
What
we are being shown in Harrison’s brilliant sci-fi narrative is the structural
importance of what I playfully call “literary singularities”. It’s worth mentioning that Ken MacLeod,
another contemporary sci-fi writer, actually called Light a “literary singularity”.[i] MacLeod intends this in a kind of
critical-generic fashion, which certainly suits the novel; however, by “literary
singularity” I mean that Harrison is actually manipulating certain structural
points within the narrative – points that have traditionally been governed by
what Fredric Jameson theorized as the “unknowability thesis” – where
representation and expression fail. The
laws of physics might be described as a method whereby human subjects represent
reality to themselves, and theoretical quandaries such as black holes and time
travel are points where these laws no longer hold any water; the
representational model fails. Light is critically aware of this
failure; these scientific forms figure in the text as analogous singularities:
both gravitational and textual. The
anomalies of science and the natural world achieve the status of effectual
narrative components, perhaps the most important narrative components.
I’m
skeptical, however, of Jameson’s dialectical model of unknowability or
inexpressibility within a Marxist hermeneutical framework, although I’ve
expressed my fondness for this model in previous posts (namely, my post on
science fiction and historicism). While
I admit that Jameson’s method is not only theoretically rigorous but also one
of the most influential approaches to literary theory in the past half-century,
I want to stress that the dialectic poses problems for critics. Perhaps most problematic is the dialectic's
tendency to succumb to causal reasoning; since dialectical thought establishes
antinomies that function in a structural relationship to one another, and these
antinomies eventually must be reconciled (the Hegelian Aufhebung), dialectical method necessarily gravitates toward a
determined telos. Anything and everything can be subsumed by
the dialectical method, which thereby insists that the total field of phenomena
somehow conceals a dialectic substance.
Thus, Hegel could claim that History is, essentially, dialectical.
The
issue thus becomes separating the theoretical practice from the inherent nature
of things. We can interpret a text
dialectically, but we must be cautious to avoid attributing a dialectical
essence to the object on which our method fixates. This is a major problem with much dialectical
thought: while it takes texts as its objects, it doesn’t stop here but
continues on to claim that the historical movement and conditions wherein
phenomena might be witnessed (literary genres, class conflict, scientific
development, etc.) is also
dialectical. But if current science and
philosophy has revealed anything to us, it is the obliteration of teleology and
idealism; history has no governing essence that necessitates one logical
conclusion. The laws of history and
culture, like those of physics in the deep regions of space, fail; and if Light demonstrates anything, it is that in the wake of these failures possibility becomes infinite.
The
term “singularity” here has a very important definition that I should clarify
before continuing. I intend this term
not in what is perhaps its most immediate sense: something that is singular,
although this is certainly a component of what I intend. The appropriate definition in this context is
most closely linked to the use of the term in general relativity: a
gravitational singularity, otherwise known as a black hole, an anomaly of
space-time so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational
center. Because of this extreme density,
everything in a black hole collapses into an infinitesimally small point: a
singularity. Theoretically, black holes
are also demarcated by mathematical limits known as event horizons (here, readers
might be reminded of Paul W.S. Anderson’s cinematic sci-fi cult classic about a
spaceship that mysteriously returns from the depths of space after vanishing
some years prior).
The
event horizon is the truly intriguing structural component of a black hole that
enables it as a metaphor for what I am deeming “literary singularities” in
Harrison’s novel. The event horizon
marks the limit beyond which nothing (not even light) can escape the gravitational grip of the black hole. Once something crosses this boundary, it will
gradually be pulled toward the singularity and broken down atom by atom. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains:
If you stumbled upon a black hole and found yourself
falling feet-first toward its center, then as you got closer, the black hole’s
force of gravity would grow astronomically.
Curiously, you would not feel this force at all because, like anything
in free fall, you are weightless. What you
do feel, however, is something far more sinister. While you fall, the black hole’s force of
gravity at your two feet, they being closer to the black hole’s center,
accelerates them faster than does the weaker force of gravity at your
head. The difference between the two is
known officially as the tidal force, which grows precipitously as you draw
nearer to the black hole’s center […] Your body would stay whole until the
instant the tidal force exceeded your body’s molecular bonds […] That’s the
gory moment when your body snaps into two segments, breaking apart at your
midsection. Upon falling further, the
difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments
snaps into two segments. Shortly thereafter,
those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth and so
forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts. (Tyson
284)
Furthermore, Tyson goes on to explain, you would
also “extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed
through a tube” (285). All in all, not a
pleasant way to die, provided you were wearing a sealed suit and hadn’t already
succumbed from exposure to vacuum.
Space, as Tyson describes and Harrison reminds us in Light, is an inhospitable place.
The
most interesting factor concerning the event horizon is its appearance to an
outside observer. Human beings require
light to see, but since light cannot escape a black hole once it’s crossed the
event horizon, humans cannot actually “see” a black hole (hence the painfully
obvious nomination). What happens, then,
when an object traverses the theoretical boundary of the event horizon? Rather than simply disappearing to an outside
observer, the object instead would appear to tumble eternally toward the event
horizon, always nearing the point of no return, but never actually crossing it
(think of an asymptote, a curve which approaches the line of a graph without
ever actually touching it). Likewise, if
a subject traversed the event horizon, the moment of crossing would be
mathematically calculable, but invisible; there would be no discernible visible
difference.
Since
information itself cannot escape a
black hole, any method of representation fails.
While mathematics and quantum physics can point us toward knowledge of a
black hole’s existence, they cannot explain what a black hole is.
Descriptions of black holes as collapsed stars whose masses and
densities have reached such extremes that not even light can escape their
gravity helps us understand how a black hole comes to be, but doesn’t explain
(again) what it is. Most immediately,
all we can say about black holes is that they are nothing; but nothing cannot exert the devastating forces that
gravitational singularities exert on the observable universe.
Can
it?
In Light, the Kefahuchi Tract is an
observable, or naked, singularity. It is
a singularity without an event horizon, thus allowing observers to visibly
witness it (theories do exist for naked singularities in current science, but
none have been discovered). However,
even visibility doesn’t permit answers for Harrison’s readers. If the singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract is
visible, it is radically illogical. The Kefahuchi
Tract – and the universe in general – becomes, in Harrison’s literary vision, a
site where anything is possible: “[Humans] wondered why the universe, which
seemed so harsh on top, was underneath so pliable. Anything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. They were hoping to find out why” (Harrison
182). The Kefahuchi Tract is even more
affronting than a black hole because it makes the absence of logicality
visible.
If
the laws of physics do not hold for Harrison, neither do the laws of
literature; and this makes Light an
artistic masterpiece in my opinion. If temporal
processes break down, how can a narrative be traditionally represented? This is not a problem for Harrison, who leaps
back and forth between 1999 and 2400 seamlessly, although the two begin to
bleed into one another in the presence of the strange substance that leaks from
Kearney’s and Tate’s computer monitors.
This leads me to the quote with which I opened this post: “Information
might be a substance. Can you imagine that?” (Harrison 357). To which I then asked: can you? Harrison certainly does.
One
of the most enigmatic features of black hole research is known as the “information
paradox”, which suggests that black holes destroy physical information once
they consume it. This seems strange on
first glance, since information often appears intangible – as something known,
but not something that is. Does material contain information? Or is information projected, internalized,
and represented by observing subjects?
Harrison’s delicious romp through space and time posits a universe wherein
information exists on an entirely different scale, as something physical,
tangible, and perhaps even biological. I
would refrain from claiming that there is any conclusion to Light; I don’t think it attempts any conclusion. It embraces an environment and narrative
structure where a wealth of information proliferates, but remains incalculable
to the human sciences. Light accepts a universe where (just as
in our reality) researchers and scholars posit theories and hypotheses by which
to navigate space-time; but the novel exposes these theories to a harsh and
capricious non-totality where anything seems to work. This in turn invites the following question:
what happens if things stop working?
If
information is a substance, a substrate, to the universe in Light, then the Kefahuchi Tract is a
window into its non- and pre-human ontology.
It does not conform to epistemological structures; or, if it does, it
conforms to all of them. Rather than a void, an unobservable absence
that consumes light and information, the Kefahuchi Tract is observable; rather
than consuming physical laws to the point that nothing functions, it
deconstructs the limits of physical possibility. Causal reasoning faces its greatest
challenge. The problem of induction
first posed by David Hume suddenly surges to the forefront. Viewed in this light (an unavoidable pun),
the narrative universe almost seems to take on an abstractly benign
quality. There is no doubt that Light is a violent story, but behind the
three narrative strains lurks something of a unifying thread. I would not go so far as to claim that
Harrison believes our universe to be inherently benign. That would grant far too much
anthropomorphism to its being. There is,
however, far more to it than what is visible.
[i]
This reference is from the collection of excerpted critical praise at the
beginning of Light.
Works Cited
Harrison, M John. Light.
New York: Bantam Dell, 2007. Print.
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., Inc.,
2007. Print.
